Emma Stone’s career has never followed a single path for long.

She broke through as a razor-sharp comedy performer, became a romantic leading lady, entered the world of superheroes, transformed into a Disney villain, and eventually built one of Hollywood’s most distinctive creative partnerships with director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Along the way, Stone has won two Academy Awards for Best Actress—first for La La Land and later for Poor Things—while proving equally comfortable in broad comedy, intimate drama, historical satire and deeply strange experimental films.

Ranking her best movies therefore means considering more than box-office success. The strongest choices combine the quality of the film, Stone’s performance, cultural impact and how important each role became to her evolution as an actress.

Here are the 10 that stand above the rest.

10. Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

Stone does not dominate Crazy, Stupid, Love., but the movie provided one of the earliest demonstrations of the chemistry she would later share with Ryan Gosling.

She plays Hannah, whose unexpected connection with Gosling’s smooth-talking Jacob helps expose the insecurity hiding beneath his carefully cultivated confidence.

Their late-night conversation after returning to Jacob’s house remains one of the movie’s best sequences because it abandons the expected seduction and allows the characters simply to talk.

That easy chemistry would become even more important five years later in La La Land.

9. Zombieland (2009)

Before becoming an Oscar-winning dramatic actress, Stone was helping Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson survive a zombie apocalypse.

As Wichita, she is clever, suspicious and extremely difficult to fool. Together with her younger sister Little Rock, played by Abigail Breslin, she initially survives by trusting almost nobody.

Stone’s deadpan humor fits perfectly with the movie’s combination of horror and comedy.

Zombieland also arrived at an important stage of her career, shortly before Easy A transformed her into a genuine leading star.

A decade later, she returned as Wichita in Zombieland: Double Tap.

8. Cruella (2021)

Turning one of Disney’s most recognizable villains into the protagonist of her own origin story was always going to require a major personality.

Stone delivers one.

In Cruella, she plays Estella, an ambitious young designer whose rebellious alter ego gradually emerges as she battles Emma Thompson’s formidable Baroness von Hellman in 1970s London.

The movie leans heavily into fashion, punk-inspired spectacle and theatrical rivalry, but Stone understands exactly how large the performance needs to be.

Her Cruella can be vulnerable one minute and gloriously excessive the next.

The result gave Stone another major franchise role while allowing her to play someone far more morally complicated than the conventional Disney heroine.

7. Battle of the Sexes (2017)

Stone followed her La La Land Oscar victory with an entirely different kind of challenge.

In Battle of the Sexes, she portrays tennis champion Billie Jean King opposite Steve Carell’s Bobby Riggs.

The movie centers on their famous 1973 tennis match, but Stone’s performance goes beyond recreating a sporting event.

Her King is dealing simultaneously with professional pressure, gender inequality and questions surrounding her private life.

Rather than simply impersonating an icon, Stone finds the person underneath the public image.

It remains one of the most grounded performances of her career.

6. Easy A (2010)

Without Easy A, Emma Stone’s career might look very different.

She plays Olive Penderghast, a high school student whose small lie about her sexual experience spreads through school and transforms her reputation almost overnight.

The role requires Stone to carry nearly the entire movie.

She does it with sarcasm, intelligence and the kind of comic timing that would become one of her trademarks.

Olive knows the absurdity of what is happening around her, and Stone makes the audience feel like her private ally.

More importantly, Easy A proved she was not merely a funny supporting actress.

She could be the reason audiences bought a ticket.

5. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman revolves around Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson, a former superhero star desperately trying to reinvent himself through a Broadway production.

Stone plays his daughter Sam, recently out of rehab and working as his assistant.

It is a supporting role, but she makes every major scene count.

Sam’s frustration with her father gives Stone some of the sharpest dramatic material she had received up to that point, particularly when she tears apart Riggan’s need to remain culturally relevant.

The performance earned Stone her first Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actress.

The film itself went on to win Best Picture.

4. The Favourite (2018)

If Birdman demonstrated Stone’s dramatic potential, The Favourite showed how dangerous she could be when comedy and cruelty were combined.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the film places Stone alongside Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz in the court of Queen Anne.

Stone plays Abigail, who arrives at court with little power but quickly recognizes an opportunity to regain social status.

Her transformation is fascinating because it happens gradually.

At first, Abigail appears vulnerable.

Then ambition surfaces.

By the time her rivalry with Lady Sarah intensifies, Stone has turned the character into someone simultaneously charming, funny and ruthless.

The performance earned another Oscar nomination and began the Stone-Lanthimos collaboration that would later reshape her career.

3. Bugonia (2025)

By the time Bugonia arrived, Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos had developed one of the most adventurous actor-director partnerships in contemporary Hollywood.

Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the powerful CEO of a major pharmaceutical company who is kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed men convinced she is an alien planning the destruction of Earth.

Jesse Plemons plays one of her captors.

The premise is absurd, but Bugonia uses that absurdity to create something darker: a battle over power, paranoia and competing versions of reality.

Stone once again embraces a character who cannot be easily categorized as victim, villain or hero.

Her continued willingness to make such strange choices is exactly what separates the current phase of her career from the conventional movie-star trajectory she might easily have followed after La La Land.

2. La La Land (2016)

For many viewers, Mia Dolan remains the definitive Emma Stone performance.

Mia is an aspiring actress in Los Angeles enduring humiliating auditions while chasing the possibility of a breakthrough. She falls in love with Sebastian, Ryan Gosling’s jazz musician, but their relationship becomes increasingly complicated as their professional dreams begin coming true.

Stone has to sing, dance, perform comedy and eventually deliver some of the movie’s most emotionally difficult scenes.

Her audition sequence near the end strips away almost everything except her face and voice.

It helped earn Stone her first Academy Award for Best Actress.

But La La Land lasts because Mia’s success comes with an uncomfortable question: what happens when getting the life you dreamed about means losing another life you might also have loved?

The final sequence answers without needing much dialogue.

Stone’s expression does the rest.

1. Poor Things (2023)

Poor Things demanded something extraordinary from Emma Stone.

She responded with the most fearless performance of her career.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the film stars Stone as Bella Baxter, a woman brought back to life by the unconventional scientist Godwin Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe.

Bella begins with an almost childlike understanding of the world.

Then she develops—physically, intellectually, emotionally and sexually—at extraordinary speed.

Stone therefore cannot play Bella as one fixed personality. Her movement changes. Her language changes. Her understanding of relationships, freedom and society changes.

The performance is wildly funny but never merely comedic.

Stone also served as a producer on the film, strengthening a creative partnership with Lanthimos in which she has increasingly become more than simply the star standing in front of the camera.

At the 2024 Academy Awards, Stone won Best Actress for Poor Things, becoming a two-time winner in the category before turning 36.

That achievement alone would make the film important.

But the real reason it deserves No. 1 is visible on screen.

Easy A revealed her comic instincts. Birdman confirmed her dramatic ability. The Favourite exposed a darker edge. La La Land made her one of the defining stars of her generation.

Poor Things combines nearly everything.

It is physical, hilarious, uncomfortable, emotional and completely unconcerned with whether Bella behaves like a conventional leading lady.

And that may be the clearest description of Emma Stone’s career itself.

She became famous by being charming.

Her greatest performances arrived when she became increasingly unafraid to be strange.